2018 Reading Challenge: A Book by a Canadian Author

So I’ve decided to Challenge the Mind with a reading challenge this year, I started this challenge by being a bit patriotic and choosing a book by a Canadian Author. So, of course, the Canadian Author I choose was the impeccable Margaret Atwood! I’ve read a few Margaret Atwood Novels and Series so I wanted to choose one that I haven’t read so I picked “Cat’s Eye”.

Cat’s Eye is a very thought-provoking Novel about a woman named Elaine a painter whose art is very controversial on the Toronto scene and returns to Toronto for an Art Show, Showcasing her past works. On Return she’s struggling with the memories of her old life in Toronto and the past that’s she’s meant to get over but has shaped her so vividly. Coming to terms with the many aspects of her being a woman, Eliane takes you on a vivid journey through childhood friends, lovers, family, loss and acceptance of self.

The Book has a lot of undertones of feminist commentary on the ways that women are percieved and how they perceive themselves. There’s also the play on women’s relationships and the secret world of girls and how they interact and shape each other and how easily they tear each other down instead of building each other up. This pushes women into allowing men to dictate our lives and allows double standards and hierarchies to emerge. Margaret Atwood writes mostly about women’s interactions in the novel and only shows the small impact that males have on a young girl and later as a woman.

The novel in terms of the writing is written in a haunting manner that Margaret Atwood has perfected, that sticks with you and really grabs and encapsulates you in every word but has this air of off-handed simplicity. As if every sentence was written effortlessly and she just uses her personal thoughts to guide her and it’s all very personal. Yet, while her writing holds a lot of her, there is still the ability to find yourself in her words where things resignation and sink in and have an impact. Margaret Atwood always hits home to me, she’ll always be an author that speaks personal truths that really makes me sit back and think about the world and others.

Besides the obvious feminist tones, there’s also this theme of perception and how we perceive yourself and how others perceive us is going to be different, yet we’ll never know what that difference is. We can only assume and guess and question how other’s choose to see us unless they say something to us directly, we just have our personal understandings, and they might be swayed by our own issues and experiences. There’s also the understanding that everyone else has their own lives and experiences and we’ll never know what’s going on with people that pop in and out of our lives.

This is such a great thought-provoking novel and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who likes a good thought provoking yet beautifully simplistic novel.

Now the next book is going to be announced on my Instagram (@contemporarycomprehensions), feel free to follow to keep up with all the books or to see what other things are going to happen, have happened or happened behind the scenes.